Siri acquires “shortcuts”, simple actions which can be launched verbally or with a button press, and chained together to produce mini programs for power users.

Safari’s tracking prevention features have been upgraded: they’ll now lock Facebook out of tracking users through its comment boxes and like buttons, and prevent anyone from “fingerprinting” devices by looking at their configuration details.

From 2019, the Mac will be able to run iOS apps – four of which are launching this autumn, as Apple ports over News, Stocks, Home and Voice Memos.

Tim Cook wraps things up

See you next year, Apple fans. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

And that’s it! Tim Cook comes back on stage to run through the previous updates, and give the standard rubric: updates will be available this autumn, and the developer betas will be available today.

The show ends with a montage of video interviews with loved ones of app developers, including the backstory of Yelp, who are currently fighting Google in nearly every venue going over the latter’s monopoly power. Is that a pointed decision by Apple? Could be.

Are macOS and iOS merging?

“The fact that the Mac and iOS share so much technology has led people every year to ask us the question: are you merging macOS and iOS” Federighi asks, before offering a one-word answer: “No”.

But, he notes, Mac users not only run Mac apps, but also web apps, and games – built on cross-platform tech. Why not also let them run iOS apps?

In developer terms, this means that UIKit, the tools used to build iOS apps, will shortly be getting a Mac version. As I guessed below, News, Home, Stocks and Voice Memos are the test versions of that.

Developers will get those tools in 2019, Federighi says. (There’s a notable lack of applause from a typically very cheery audience to this particular news. I’m not sure developers really wanted this feature.)

‘No no, no no no no, no no no no, no no no App Limits’ Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The changes that came to the iOS app store are making their way to the Mac App store next, which is getting editorial content, autoplaying videos, and recommendations.

More importantly, Apple has won round some big App Store holdouts, including Microsoft, Adobe, Panic and BBEdit.

It will be interesting to see whether these companies are coming purely because of the promise of fancier graphic design, or if Apple has also changed its business model to solve some of their issues. An inability to offer paid updates, the 30% cut Apple takes, and the limitations of the Mac App Store security features have all driven away developers historically.

Apple is turning off Facebook’s ability to track users

A big one: Apple is turning off Facebook’s ability to track users across the web through like buttons and comment feeds. Federighi doesn’t cite the social network by name, but reassures users that iOS’s intelligent tracking protection will now cover that content as well. If this is enabled by default, it could have a wide-ranging effect on the company’s ability to track its users.

And the tracking protection is also making it harder for data companies “to uniquely identify your device and track you”, limiting the information about things like fonts and system configuration that third parties can find.

Next up, Apple News, Stocks, Home and Voice Memos are launching on the Mac. There isn’t really much to say, here: it’s Apple News, Stocks, Home and Voice Memos, but on the Mac. This does suggest, though, that rumours of a crossover between iOS and macOS may be true – these apps do look very similar to the iPad versions. We’ll see.

OK, so, dark mode wasn’t really the flagship feature. Next up is “desktop stacks”, which attempts to save people who keep all their files on the desktop from themselves: the hundreds of files you store there will now be simply and easily grouped by type.

The Finder itself also gets a slight rehaul. A gallery view replaces the old coverflow, letting you cycle through (and lightly edit) files in the document manager itself.

(As Federighi demonstrates a new screenshot tool, there’s also a glimpse of the new Safari which features real icons again, something users – well, me – have been calling for for a while.)

Continuity, Apple’s name for the mac/iOS crossover features, gets a focus: Mac apps can now call directly to the camera on the phone, letting users take a picture automatically from apps such as Keynote.